domenica 15 maggio 2016

Panini Foot 2016 (Hardcover album)

Panini and French League have a long history together, since the first album was published in 1976. The collection has been released every year for the last 40 years. The album of the season 2015/2016 is thus a special event and Panini released an hardcover version of the album to celebrate the 40 years anniversary. The album has a different cover picture and there are four introductory pages about the history of Ligue 1, but for the rest it is the same of the softcover version and the stickers of the collection are also the same.

Ligue 1 teams are as usual shown in alphabetical order. Each team is displaced over four pages with a total of 24 stickers: the club logo (metallic sticker), the coach, the top player (metallic sticker), the top recrue ("top purchase", metallic sticker), the top espoir ("top young promise", metallic sticker), and 19 player portraits. As usual since 2007 the collection is updated with a transfer set released in the spring with the players arrived during the winter market. For each team there is space up to four update stickers.

PSG had no rivals during the season, confirming the title ownership of the previous years.

The section about Ligue 2 teams starts with the calendar of the season. Teams are then shown in alphabetical order with two teams on one page. Each team includes two stickers: the metallic club badge and the team photo. Details about the squad, palmares and results of the last seasons are also included.

Nancy, Metz and Dijon are promoted to Ligue 1 for the next season, whereas Evian, Créteil and Paris FC are relegated to the National League.

A new entry in Panini Foot, the club Red Star FC from Saint-Ouen (north of Paris)

The back cover of the hardcover album

Update stickers of this collection are included in a transfer set released in March. In the transfer set there are a total of 40 stickers to be glued on each team page, with a maximum of 4 stickers per team. In the set there are also 6 corrections stickers to update the original stickers that had small mistakes in the player details. Mini-stickers "Joueur Transféré" (for players) and "Nouveau coach" (for trainers) are also included and they can be glued in correspondance of the coaches and players that left the club during the winter market session. After consulting online websites with the list of transfers during the winter session, these are the players that require the ministicker "Joueur Transféré" (I suggest that the mini-sticker is glued below or above the original sticker, but not on top):